January 2015

01/30/2015

Smithsonian Gardens and the United States Botanic Garden opened the 20th annual orchid exhibition, “Orchids: Interlocking Science and Beauty,” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Saturday, January 24, 2015 (closes April 26, 2015). On any given day, the exhibition will display more than 300 orchids. Change-outs occur often; during the course of the exhibit thousands of orchids will be on view.

“Orchids: Interlocking Science and Beauty” will explore the rich crossroads where orchid botany, horticulture, and technology connect. Featuring orchids from the Smithsonian Gardens Orchid Collection and the United States Botanic Garden Orchid Collection, the exhibit looks at how new ideas, technologies, and inventions change the way we study, protect, and enjoy orchids. Each new innovation is like a puzzle piece: it fills in gaps in our knowledge and creates a larger and more complex picture of orchids.

At first, Victorian explorers and horticulturists found ways to transport and grow exotic orchids. More recently, we have developed labs to grow these flowers on a massive scale (though some labs concentrate on learning about wild orchids). Our relatively recent awareness of the need to protect wild orchids has spurred conservation efforts, both in nature reserves and in labs.

The future of orchids is full of possibility. Today we use DNA technologies to create new orchid hybrids, and identify wild species and their symbiotic fungi. Meanwhile, imaging technologies reveal new facets of these fascinating flowers.

The Department of Botany Curator Kenneth Wurdack, along with members from Smithsonian Gardens and the Office of Exhibits, were part of the exhibition development team. For many years, Department of Botany staff members have participated on the development team for the annual orchid show.

01/27/2015

This year brought dismal news about the world's birds: They are vanishing at an alarming rate. Across 25 European countries, about 420 million fewer birds are present today than in 1980, a 20% decrease, especially in the 36 most common species. In North America, The State of the Birds Report 2014 indicates that over the past 40 years, the numbers of individuals across 33 species are also down by hundreds of millions. Such assessments highlight the urgency of determining the precise causes of these declines. The knowledge gleaned from the Avian Phylogenomics Project, coupled with ecological and population analyses, should provide new insights into the factors that influence bird declines and extinctions. As the project progresses over the next few years, over 60% of tissue samples for the avian analyses will be derived from archived museum collections. In this era of deteriorating natural environments, a pressing challenge is to continue to build scientific collections for future needs.

Museum collections, and the species they represent, provide windows into the past, inform about the present, and help predict the future of natural habitats and human-altered environments. They are the common language of the biological sciences. An antiquated view of collections suggests drawers of bird skins, empty shells, and dried plants. However, current collections also include living specimens, spirit-preserved samples, deep-frozen tissues, and DNA. These irreplaceable biomaterials are invaluable representatives of Earth's biodiversity, and together with their associated metadata are archived ex situ for long-term documentation, public education and exhibition, and scientific and applied research. Although the exact number of collections maintained in museums, botanic gardens, and universities is unknown, estimates as high as three billion specimens suggest the magnitude of this storehouse of information about the natural world.

01/22/2015

The National Tropical Botanical Garden and the Department of Botany at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History presented a one-day symposium titled, “Agents of Change: Botanic Gardens in the 21st Century” on October 7, 2014, in Washington, DC. The symposium brought together the world's leading scientists, researchers, and garden leaders to share the most pressing issues, trends, and solutions at botanical gardens, to the challenges faced by the natural environment, the struggles to feed the hungry, and the losses of cultural diversity.

The symposium was structured around four over-arching topics: (1) Extinction or survival: conserving plants in a changing world; (2) Feast or famine: how we can and will feed 9 billion people; (3) Biocultural conservation: interpreting the richness of the human experience; and (4) Operational sustainability: are botanic gardens an endangered species? Each topic featured three to four guest speakers and was followed by an expert panel with five leaders in botany.